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Loremakers Guide to the Galaxy is now it’s own show! Check out the first episode with The Relay’s transcript.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read)

Terra is considered by some as the “Jewel of the UEE”

Terra was discovered in 2516 by chief surveyor and engineer of the Eastern Expansion Program by Wei-Yin Song with the designation: 342A

Terra’s sun: Terra Nova, is a G-Type main sequence star almost identical to SOL’s with 4 planets, three within the habitable zone and has seven jump points.

The closest planet to Terra Nova is Aero, filled with rich minerals, but too hot to mine them.

Pike, one of three of the habitable planets is still too hot for colonisation, but has a large automated mining operation with is responsible for the majority of Terra’s wealth

The populus of Terra holds a political group called the Transitionalists who are progressive and feel that Terra should be the capital of the UEE because of its location, wealth, and jump points. The Centralists feel the opposite and that Earth should remain as the capital.

In 2922 a buoy was placed near a major Terra shipping lane with a virus that eventually gained the nickname Death Ger. This virus spread to thousands of ships and eventually rendered them inoperable and crippling Terra’s trading for a period of time.

Terra is a naturally occurring super Earth with low density so gravity is within human limits to thrive

Evidence of previously civilization that is no longer there

Environment largely unspoiled as there was a movement to keep the environment from getting too polluted

Well known for it’s balance between nature and technology

In 2722, J. Harris Arnold created Anvil Aerospace on Terra

In 2913, Jennifer Friskers moved Origin Jumpworks from Earth to Terra

Terran senator, Kelso Albavar lobbied on behalf of the Jiso Corporation(Xi’An corporation) for them to have business licenses to run CTR refueling stations all around the empire

Terra’s always had progressive relations with alien species, if not for their relations with the Xi’An the Messer regime would not have come to an end

Gen is a diplomatic/military planet, a place to discuss political influence Terra has exerted on the UEE over past centuries

This goes back to the Messer era where Terra was the focal point of anti-Messer information/anti-Messer activism

Assan Kieran in 2638 proposed an amendment that would have given Terra sovereignty from the UEE, he lost his subsequent senate race and claimed voter fraud

Terran Akari negotiated peace with the Xi’An in 2789 which lead to the downfall of the Messer regime a few years later

Current senator Mira Ngo proposed that the UEE capital move from Earth to Terra in 2942, four years ago

Henge Cluster, naturally occurring asteroids with some good minerals

Marisol Belt on the outskirts of the system protects the major bodies from asteroid collisions

Full Transcript

Cherie Heiberg (CH): Hello, I’m Cherie Heiberg, the Archivist here at Cloud Imperium games. Welcome to a new edition of the Loremakers Guide to the Galaxy. For those of who you have not seen Loremakers Guide before, it is a segment in which the lore creators of the game get together and discuss the science and history and myth behind each of our systems. Today I am delighted to talk about Terra, the shiny jewel of the UEE.

Adam Wieser (AW): Ugh, no, no. Terra is more like the terrible center of the UEE right now, Earth is the real centre of this galaxy.

CH: Spoken like someone who is jealous of all the commerce and population and activity that is happening in Terra.

AW: So it goes, so it goes. I guess if I have to do this, I’ll do this. Let’s talk about Terrible.

CH: Terrible?

AW: Oh excuse me, Terra.

CH: Kind of rude there isn’t he?

AW: It just slipped out, it slipped out.

CH: Where’s all this hatred coming from.

AW: It’s coming from, I think Terra’s attitude towards them being better and everything there being perfect and just awesome.

CH: Well I’m just going to tell you this, the thing about Terra is you might think of us all the time and like tell us were bad, but we really just don’t think about you at all.

AW: That’s the problem, they don’t think abou the rest of the UEE

CH: [laughs]

AW: It’s kind of too bad, but Terra is a system that was discovered back in 2516 by Wei-Yin Song who was the chief surveyor and engineer of the UEE’s Eastern Expansion Program.

CH: Oh we may as well, why don’t we just check it out?

AW: Yeah, take us to where he is. Now Terra, the name is derivative of Earth or remind you of that. Don’t blame Wei-Yin Song on that, his Eastern Expansion Program actually named the system 342A which has a much better ring to it than Terra.

CH: Yeah.

AW: It’s kind of a shame we got away from that.

CH: Oh yeah we know people remember a long sequence of numbers much better than they remember words.

AW: Yeah.

CH: So anyway, Terra is a small system with a sun that’s almost identical to ours. It’s a G-type main sequence star. It has four planets, three which are in the natural habitable zone unlike earth which only has two. It’s a nexus of seven jump points. A natural nexus of seven jump points and maybe there’ll be even more to find so with that large amount of jump points, all things in the UEE eventually do flow through Terra.

The star was named Terra Nova after the planet which was a bit of an unusual move, but it had stuck, the UEE approved of that name and here it is today. Alright so let’s move out to Aero here, the first planet in the system.

This is Aero, it is the first planet in the system, it’s a Miso planet which inhabits the kind of grey area between dwarf planets and major planets. It is full of rich minerals, but so far the heat on the planet is a little bit too much for anyone like human or machine to go down and mine what’s there, but eventually with the power of human innovation, we will get there and we will be able to harvest the incredible amount of minerals that are present within the planet.

AW: That’s another thing about Terra that’s a little infuriating, is that they just believe human progress is all that is needed for this universe to shaped the way humanity wants it to be. Whether it’s you know us finally figuring out the science to get really close to a sun that we were never ever intended to get really, really close to just so we can extract the resources for more trade which benefits them and fun stuff. It’s very indicative of the political movement that you find very apparent here. Basically the power system is here in Terra, it’s called the Transitionalist and they are very progressive, they believe Terra should actually be the capital of the entire UEE as crazy as that sounds, versus the Centralists, who are a political entity group that believes in keeping Earth and humanity’s roots. Though ugly as they may be at some points as a reminder of where we all began. So yeah, one little strange thing about Terra is just that idea that if we believe hard enough, that we can make it right, that it can go right.

CH: Well that’s what they said about space travel too and look at us, we’ve colonized the whole galaxy.

AW: Not the whole galaxy, you guys may want to, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

CH: It can happen. Anyway, these two moons of Aero here are captured asteroids, Petrum and Petris. They’re a little misshapen and I remind you again that the Starmap is not to scale and it’s not true to shape. We are hoping in the future to get that addressed.

So let’s zoom out here and let’s visit Pike, the second planet from the sun. Here we go. It is technically in the habitable zone, but it’s a little too hot for people. So instead of having people on the surface, there’s a big… you know there’s this marvel of technology there that’s an automated mining system. It makes it so people don’t need to risk their lives doing high danger, high stakes mining and instead it’s put into the hands of automation. It is maintained by professionals who visit the planet every so often to make sure that nothing is going wrong, to perform maintenance on the robots and the wealth of minerals found on this planet is largely responsible for the wealth of Terra.

AW: Yeah.

CH: Along with the wealth of the asteroid belts and the asteroid cluster. So yeah there is just a lot of good resources here that are exported to the rest of the galaxy and keep Terra from becoming too polluted.

AW: Yeah I mean they have a lot of resources here. They didn’t have the cradle of humanity, but there is a lot of rocks you can rip out of these planets here, but again I just think the Terran obsession with technology can be a little too much. Back August 9, 2922, there was a center buoy that hanging out in space here in Terra, near one of the major shipping lanes and, on that buoy was a virus which was being sent to every ship that came in contact with it and that virus spread from ship to ship and a few days later, this virus which the fingerprints on it earned it the name Death Ger. Basically infected hundreds and thousands of center suites and ships all around the empire, it spread to all these different systems and just one day everyone who had Death Ger in their sensor system just went straight to gray scale and they couldn’t fly, it drove flight to a halt in many systems. It killed a lot of this very prosperous trade in Terra, it ground it to a halt all because of this technology that this Terran believed a little too much in to really watch out dangers like this. So yeah, it’s nice you have resources run by technology, but it’s not always the best thing.

CH: I mean viruses happen everyday but clearly the only virus that matters is the one that happened in Terra, am I right everybody?

AW: Yup, you are actually. Thank you, thank you for making that point, I appreciate that.

CH: Where’s this hostility coming from? Anyway, here is Terra itself. It is a naturally occurring super Earth with low density so that the gravity is quite within Terran…quite within human limits so people can thrive pretty easily on it. It has an environment that didn’t need to be terraformed so it was basically ready made for people to move in.

There is evidence that a civilization once was on this planet, it’s no longer there so there were no sentient lifeforms to massacre unlike some other planets I can name. The environment is largely unspoiled by human activity, when people moved in there was a movement to keep the environment from getting too polluted unlike what humanity did to Earth, very sad story.

We’re still dealing with the fallout from the heavy pollutants that have affected the balance on Earth to this day. So, when we move to Terra the goal was to make sure that did not happen. Luckily we were able to keep that up so Terra currently has this…it’s well known for it’s lovely balance between nature and technology and so you would get wonderful views from the various landing zones. It’s just a pretty nice place to be.

AW: Yeah, you know all the…I’ll give Terra props for especially Prime which is a very beautiful city that really does balance technology and the cityscape along with the nature around it. It pretty much has everything there except for really… a native culture of a town it can really identify with.

CH: Oh geeze…

AW: If you’re in the vapid places, great beautiful place to visit but yeah, not much past that.

CH: Terra has it’s own culture, it’s this beautiful mix of cultures from all over the galaxy and so you have this combination of human elements and alien elements coming together and you can find pretty much everything you could possibly want that comes through Terra and is there, it’s lovely.

AW: Including that beautiful kind of like rock formation that they believe might tie back to a former species that lived on that planet which is very beautiful to visit and that’s why Terrans have turned it into a tourist trap.

CH: Which creates a lot of jobs for people who live on Terra and boost the economy.

AW: That seems to be what Terra is all about, it’s less about humanity, it’s more about Terra’s economy and there are a lot of businesses that thrive here. On 2722, J. Harris Arnold created Anvil Aerospace here in Terra. In 2913, Jennifer Friskers very famously moved Origin Jumpworks from Earth to Terra, it was very controversial.

Even recently the Terran senator, Kelso Albavar, basically lobbied on the behalf of the Jiso Corporation which is a Xi’An corporation, so they could have business licenses to run CTR refueling stations all around the empire which is great for haulers and it’s a great way to have a lot of that trade and money go out of our empire at the end of the day. So, it’s..yeah.

CH: Well, Terra’s always been very good about progressive relations with aliens and if not for Terra’s progressive relationship with the Xi’An, we may still be under the thumb of the Messer regime.

AW: That’s very true and it’s hard to deny that point and if we want to go our fourth planet in the system, this is Gen.

CH: It’s pronounced G-en.

AW: Is it?

CH: Yes.

AW: Ok, all right. All right, see Terran’s always going to correct you on pronunciations and things like that. So, this is a… it’s not represented in the UE senate, it’s a mainly a diplomatic and military planet. So, it’s a good place to talk about the political influence that Terra has exerted on the UEE over these past centuries.

It goes back all the way to the Messer era where Terra really was the focal point of anti-Messer information or anti-Messer activism during those dark times. There is even the tragic story of an Assan Kieran who in 2638 proposed an amendment that would have basically given Terra sovereignty from the UEE. He lost his subsequent senate which he claims was due to voter fraud.

CH: Quite possible in that day…

AW: He did go missing shortly thereafter, it was a very sad, tragic point and I have to agree that the Terrans were good at being able to pull the Messer regime out of there because if it wasn’t for Terran Akari in 2789 who independently negotiated a peace with the Xi’An which basically undercut the power of the Messer regime and lead to their downfall just a few years later and that’s all well and good and it was really nice to be a part of that but that attitude still continues to today, where there current senator Mira Ngo has still proposed that the centre and the capital of the UEE move from Earth to Terra. This happened just 2942, just four years ago so you would think you guys would just be happy being a part of this greater entity rather than making that entity your own.

CH: Oh yeah, it’s not about making it our own it’s about moving the capital to a more centrally located place with more jump points so more people can visit it and more decisions can be made by more people and more people can participate in the democratic process.

AW: So they say, so they say.

CH: Anyway, that about covers it. I would like to mention the Henge Cluster of asteroids, they naturally occur in space, they usually exist at Lagrange points which are naturally gravity wells between major bodies, major celestial bodies. It’s got some good minerals in it and we also have out here and I would like to point out the Marisol Belt real quick on the outskirts of the system, it forms a protective ring which captures incoming asteroids and has kept the collision of asteroids off any major bodies in the system to low.

AW: So, that’s great, they have a great space that keeps them from asteroids and a little more distance from the Vanduul front.

CH: All the more reason to move the capital of the UEE to a protected location. Anyway, thank you for tuning in to Loremakers Guide to the Galaxy, guys.

A polite Canadian who takes pride in making other peoples day brighter. He enjoys waffles with Maplesyrup, making delicious puns and striving for perfection in screaming at the T.V. during hockey games.

Moonlighting as a writer in her spare time StormyWinters combines her passion for the written word and love of science fiction resulting in innumerable works of fiction. As the Director of Fiction, she works with a fantastic team of writers to bring you amazing stories that transport you to new places week after week.